South asian prize longlist out

The longlist for DSC Prize for South Asian Literature 2013 was announced on Tuesday. This includes four debut novels and two works of translation from Hindi. The criteria for selection, as K Satchidanandan from the jury panel put it, was: ‘Novelty of theme, the contribution the work makes to the genre of novels and its educative and aesthetic experience.’ The selected works are Alice Albinia’s Leela’s Book, The Good Muslim by Tahmima Anam, Rahul Bhattacharya’s The Sly Company of People Who Care, Roopa Farooki’s The Flying Man, Musharraf Ali Farooqi’s Between Clay and Dust, Amitav Ghosh’s River of Smoke, Our Lady of Alice Bhatti by Mohammed Hanif, Jerry Pinto’s Em and the Big Hoom, Uday Prakash’s The Walls of Delhi, The Song Seekers by Saswati Sengupta and Jeet Thayil’s Narcopolis among others.